Here’s an excerpt:

A San Francisco cable car holds 60 people. This blog was viewed about 3,000 times in 2011. If it were a cable car, it would take about 50 trips to carry that many people.

Click here to see the complete report.

We flew to Portland to visit our son and get our truck before heading across the country to pick up our new rescue Labradoodle in Montana and then drive to Michigan. In Portland I borrowed my son’s car for a trip down to Woodland Woolworks, which had just moved from Carleton Oregon to another nearby town. I found two more types of fine kid mohair in lime green, plus some bamboo and wool in lime green and some curly mohair that was lime, white, and pale pink. I kept picking up more lime green yarn and by the time I was ready to weave the shawl at the lake, I had plenty to choose from.

I ended up using the Lamb’s Pride mixed with some of the bamboo and wool as the warp, and couldn’t resist putting in a few ends of my lumpy novelty turquoise and lime green yarn for accent, even though I was trying to make the shawl read as plain lime green. For weft I used some Nashua Creative Focus singles wool with one of the fine kid mohair yarns.

Lime green shawl being woven on my small loom at the lake with my favorite double shuttle

I was afraid I was running out of the Nashua that I had bought on sale at Woodland Woolworks, but when I called they still had some and they sent it to me so I could finish the shawl. It turned out well, but I gave it to the recipient before I had taken a photo of the finished piece.

The second lime-green shawl with darker green handspun warp stripes

Now, of course, I still had a big stash of lime green yarn. One day in The Yarn Market in Beulah, I saw some lovely thick and thin handspun singles from Latin America that was hand-dyed in shades of green from lime to dark olive. I couldn’t resist. I used it for some stripes in a mixed warp of some plied wool and some bamboo and wool. This one was less lime and more lemon, and the thicker and paler Gelato mohair worked well with it as weft. It turned out quite well, and although I am not sure where the shawl is now, I have a small square that I wove with the leftover warp. It has some nice fat fringe of the handspun singles. There is a closeup of the shawl below.

A close-up of the handspun stripes in the second lime green shawl

When I came home from the lake I brought back the remains of my lime green stash. I had actually started to like the color by then, if I blended it with something else. Once again, my husband said he needed a wedding present–this time for the woman in Thompsonville, Michigan who cuts our hair  when we are at the lake .  And once again, her favorite color was green. So I made a third lime green shawl, this time with quite a bit of turquoise in both the warp and weft.

This is the third lime green shawl

Because I was no longer constrained to do pure lime green, I was also able to use Elizabeth’s hand-dyed mohair as the weft. This one was duly sent off to Michigan after I had photographed it.

Last summer when I was getting my hair cut she gave us a picture of her husband using the shawl as a nap robe! I had actually forgotten that there were three lime green shawls, and thought that we had given her the second one with the darker green stripes. I have no idea what happened to that one.

I still have some lime green yarn left, and last winter I pulled together a bunch of pink and light green yarns, including two different interesting mohair yarns as weft. That yarn is still sitting in a basket and someday I’ll find myself warping it up for a new lime green and pink shawl–maybe two.

Mottled wool weft with pleated silk tubes for holding circular knitting needles

To my surprise the handpainted sock yarn turned into a mottled blur. I tried to improve the piece by putting in some weft stripes of the cream silk, reversing the twill direction. When I took it off the loom I realized that it was too stiff for a scarf anyway. My solution was to turn it into a hanging holder for my circular knitting needles by sewing the silk stripes into tubes.  It hangs today in my weaving studio, although I mostly use  the interchangeable set of gorgeous Knit-Pro needles  that I bought in Sweden for knitting these days.

I had more success combining some pale green Debbie Bliss Pure Silk with a skein of silk that had been handpainted in light green and shades of pink. I used the painted silk as warp stripes interspersed with the solid green, with more solid green as the weft. I did not make any attempt to line up the colors of the painted silk, but used a turned Ms and Os threading to produce vertical bars that highlighted the delicate pink.  It was quite successful, and one of the two scarves was accepted into the Hawaii Craftsmen show in fall 2010.

Turned Ms and Os pattern shows up pink and green painted silk warp

CLoseup of the gray twill shawl showing painted warp stripes and weft accents

Then I had two lovely skeins of handpainted Twisted Sisters yarn I had purchased in Berkeley and wanted to use it for warp stripes in a shawl. I had  read an article in Handwoven that provided some rather complicated instructions about how to get the colors in the skein to produce an effect something like ikat. The main trick seemed to be to measure the warp as a multiple of the length of the skein, so the colors would line up. I carefully measured the skein length at 53 inches and figured out that three times that would be a reasonable warp length for a scarf. I measured the warp, using my warping board as usual to measure down and back, which meant that every other end was reversed. The colors sort of came together, but not as clearly as I had hoped–and of course I didn’t really comprehend the problem until it was too late.

Pale gray shawl with painted yarn stripes in both warp and weft, and some darker gray weft.

The handpainted yarn had soft shades of gold, blue, and gray. Although the stripes were not as consistent as I had hoped, they did form streaks of the different colors that were kind of interesting. I alternated the painted warp stripes with some quite fine pale gray mystery yarn. For weft I used the pale gray with a very fine silk and mohair, some with a bit of glitter and some in a darker gray, and I beat it very gently to make it gauzy. That  produced a fairly nice light shawl even though the stripes were still not what I had envisioned.

I still had one skein of beautiful turquoise hand-painted silk that I had bought with my daughter’s 2009 Christmas present of a trip to The Village Spinning and Weaving Shop  in Solvang, California. The skein had said “Avalanche silk” and I remembered seeing that name on the Halcyon website. When I checked they no longer had it, but some further Googling revealed that it was made by Henry’s Attic and that led me to another online vendor who had some pure white skeins of it. I bought it and then let it sit for a long time because I was afraid to waste it on another disappointment.

Closeup of turned Ms and Os highlightin the turquoise painted silk warp

I re-read the Handwoven article more carefully and realized that in addition to using a multiple of the skein length, you also have to measure the warp in a circular fashion, and make little adjustments to get the colors to match across all the ends. I couldn’t figure out how to do that with my warping board at home. When I was taking the open studio at the Academy Art Center last fall, there wasn’t a good place to hang warping boards so people tried all sorts of different ways to set them up. One day I took two warping boards and laid them end to end horizontally on a long work table, so that I could measure out a warp that went in a circle around the pegs. This skein was also 53 inches around, so once again I set up for a warp 159 inches long. It worked, more or less. I had to adjust periodically to keep the colors in line, but I normally measure out just a couple of inches worth of warp ends at a time so that I can play with the stripe placement at the loom.

Two scarves with turquoise handpainted Avalanche silk stripes

The handpainted skein gave me three striped sections. At home, I used the same 159 inch length to wind two more narrow stripes of the  white Avalanche. In order to save enough of the white to use as weft, I added two very narrow stripes of some left over light green Debbie Bliss silk that was about the same weight, and put those into the middle of the turquoise stripes on the two sides. I used the same turned Ms and Os threading I had used before, and produced two nice scarves about 6 1/2 inches wide. One of these scarves was accepted into the Hawaii Handweavers show last June. I called it Waves Along the Shore to call attention to the undulating turquoise and green stripes  (and to make a functional weaving seem a little more “arty” for the show).

Now I am about to wrap it up as a Christmas present for my daughter, who made it possible for me to get this beautiful skein of handpainted yarn. Like the warp that I now know to measure in circular fashion, giving her the finished scarf will complete the circle.

The third day of our January 2011 workshop with Teresa Ruch, partially sponsored by the Hawaii State Foundation on Culture and the Arts, was a dyeing workshop. After working with all her luscious hand-dyed tencel and bamboo warps, we were all eager to try our hand at reproducing them.  Unlike the vat dyeing that I had done in earlier workshops, this time we would be applying the dye directly to the fiber in order to get vivid,  blending colors.

My direct-dyed (painted) skeins of tencel and bamboo dyed with fiber reactive dyes using Teresa Ruch's method. The dark purple 10/2 tencel is second from the left and the middle one is bamboo.

The preparations actually  began late  Saturday afternoon at the Academy Art Center‘s weaving room, with the big five-gallon buckets and bags of soda  ash that the dyers had brought. These were not protein fibers, so we were going to use fiber reactive dyes.  People who had finished their weaving (and knew about dyeing) set to work making Tyvek tags out of cut up US Postal Service bags, labeling the sets of bamboo and tencel skeins with numbers for each person, and putting the skeins to soak overnight in a soda ash solution. Two veteran dyers had  brought microwave ovens that they use only for dyeing, and others brought an assortment of quart jars that they reserved for mixing the toxic dyes.

Although we had a lot of fiber to dye, she had told us that if we wanted to dye any of our own materials in addition (either yarn or fabric), we should bring it along and if there were enough buckets, we could dye that as well. One participant brought a couple of Nuno felted pieces that she had made after our Melissa Arnold workshop the previous spring!

I had a pillow case full of skeins of beautiful white New Zealand wool that my neighbor and fellow weaver had passed on to me several years earlier, so I asked if that would work. Teresa said the fiber reactive dyes could be used if I soaked the wool in vinegar rather than soda ash. So I had brought a small bucket and a big jug of vinegar along with  six skeins of the wool. I followed her instructions and soon had it soaking in a vinegar bath.

On Sunday we came in our old clothes and laid out heavy plastic to cover the work tables while Teresa and our resident chemists mixed up the dyes. We all got surgical gloves to wear and the people mixing the dyes also had face masks. Then Teresa showed us her dyeing technique. A skein of yarn was removed from the soaking bucket, wrung out to remove excess water, and then laid out on a work table on top of a layer of plastic wrap. Since some of the warp skeins were five yards long, that required a pretty long work surface. She then poured dye from the quart mixing jars into three or four small paper cups with different colors  of dye.

She poured dye from the paper cups directly onto the fiber, putting different colors in different sections and then working the dye into the fiber with her gloved hands. She showed us how to move the fiber around to make sure the dye was penetrating all parts of the skein, and how to overlap the colors to blend them into nice transitions. Any excess dye water could be sopped up with the skein.

When she was satisfied with the dyeing, the skein was rolled up in the plastic wrap and then coiled onto a paper plate and put into the microwave for 2-3 minutes. It was then turned over with chopsticks and microwaved for another 2-3 minutes.  The paper plate was then removed and left to cool for a while. When the dyed skein was cool enough to handle, it was unwrapped and rinsed in cool water for quite a long time, until the water ran completely clear. Since it was a beautiful day in Honolulu, the skeins were  laid outside in the sun to dry.

After the demonstration we all set to work on the skeins with our designated number on the label. The first one I worked on was a skein of 10/2 tencel. I started pouring on purple and dark blue and turquoise and ended up getting way too much dye on it, so that it was soaking wet, dye was running all over the plastic wrap, and the dark colors were all fusing together. The solution was to grab another warp skein and use it to sop up the excess dye. I ended up with a warp skein of mixed tencel and bamboo that was in lighter shades of purple and turquoise that would go with the dark 10/2 tencel as weft.

I did a skein of bamboo in yellows, greens, and turquoise, and then one in mixed bamboo and tencel in the pink and orange shades of the warp I had woven earlier in the workshop. There were some extra skeins for sale, so I bought another 5 yard bamboo and tencel warp skein and also did that in the pinks and oranges.

As we were dyeing, some members were manning the two microwave ovens in assembly line fashion. They even had a system to tell whether they were on the first or second side of the process. Soon the microwave tables were filled with paper plates of dyed yarn waiting to go into the microwave or cooling.  When the skeins were cool enough, their owners claimed them and then began the rinsing process. Outside on the Art Center lawn there was a growing display of dyed skeins.

When I rinsed out my first skein of 10/2 tencel, it was almost black and I was quite disappointed, but more experienced people assured me that the colors would be okay when it was dry.

My skeins of painted New Zealand wool The ones on the left were done with Wilton cake dyes, and the ones on the right with fiber reactive dyes but not microwaved.

Later in the afternoon I retrieved the skeins of New Zealand wool that had been soaking in a vinegar solution. I dyed three of them in green and turquoise, but there wasn’t time to microwave them. Teresa said that any skeins we did not put into the microwave could just be packed into a plastic bag and left for 24 hours or longer and then rinsed out at home.  So I packed up my three skeins of dyed wool in one plastic bag, and put the other three undyed skeins that had been soaked in vinegar into another plastic bag. The dyed tencel and bamboo skeins out on the lawn were still somewhat damp, so when I got home I rigged up a broom handle on my deck and strung the skeins on it to dry outside. The darkest skein that had been almost black when it was wet came out in shades of deep purple when it was dry, so it will work fine as weft with its lighter warp skein of tencel and bamboo.

Teresa’s process of direct dyeing and setting the dye in a microwave was very similar to a one-day workshop I had taken in Michigan in which we dyed wool sock yarn with Wilton cake dyes. The sock yarn had been soaked overnight in a vinegar solution, and we used paint sponges to apply the cake dyes that had been dissolved in a little water. Since the cake dyes were completely non-toxic, we used Pyrex glass baking dishes to hold the plastic-wrapped skeins  and put them in a regular microwave. I liked that process because it was non-toxic, and after some searching I had  bought a set of 12 Wilton cake dyes but had never used them.

A couple of days after the workshop I remembered that I still had two plastic bags of wet wool in my weaving basket. The three dyed skeins had been sitting long enough that they could be rinsed. I put on some rubber gloves and rinsed them in the bathroom sink.  Some dye rinsed out, as expected, and the color that remained was considerably lighter than the bamboo and tencel we had dyed. I did not know if it was because it was wool soaked in vinegar, or because of the process of just leaving them in a plastic bag for two days.

Then I remembered that I also had three more skeins of wool that had been soaked in vinegar. A perfect opportunity to try out the Wilton cake dye method in my kitchen! I laid out some plastic wrap on my stainless steel kitchen counter, mixed up some little cups of green and turquoise cake dye, poured it on, and worked the dye in with my rubber-gloved hands. I was aiming for the kind of strong colors we had been producing with the fiber reactive dyes. I rolled up the dyed skeins  in plastic wrap, put them on a plate, and cooked them in my kitchen microwave. Ah, how much easier it was to work with non-toxic dyes.

When I rinsed out my cake dye skeins, the color was much brighter than the first three skeins. I hung all six skeins out to dry. Later I noticed that the wool yarn seemed to be sticking together a bit, like it was starting to felt. Both the microwaved cake dyed skeins and the non-microwaved fiber reactive dyed ones were sticky, so it wasn’t the heat of the microwave that did it. I then checked my remaining stash of pure white undyed New Zealand wool and discovered that it also has a similar stickiness. It was pretty old wool, and perhaps it was going bad. I took the wool skeins to a Handweavers Hui board meeting to consult with the experts, and they said to just weave it up anyway. I will tell you about what I’m doing with it in another post.

I had never taken the class, but I signed up for the open studio because I wanted to try some 8 harness block twill but did not want to go through the hassle of changing the tie-up on my big countermarche loom. I figured that I could quickly set up one of the  Gilmore Jack looms at the Art Center, and weave some scarves with orange and gray Debbie Bliss Pure Silk yarn that I had bought earlier in Michigan and Sweden.

In addition to the orange and gray Debbie Bliss yarn, I had bought some hand-painted silk and cashmere yarn in orange, gray, and black that blended beautifully with the orange and light gray solid color silks. The silk and cashmere yarn was actually a sturdy silk yarn loosely twisted with a very fragile cashmere that kept breaking and coming apart. With a lot of help from my friends, I finally ended up separating out the fine cashmere and just warping the silk part.

I planned to do stripes of all three yarns and then use a solid gray or orange for the weft. I had enough for two scarves, so I planned a six yard warp. I took the block twill threading from an Interweave book of scarves, but since my yarn was heavier, I sett it at 12 epi. I was concerned that the expanses of solid color in the stripes were too wide, so I divided them up in the twill blocks.

Orange and gray block twill silk scarf woven with light gray weft

It turned out the tie-ups on the Gilmore looms at the Art Center were a mess–I had to raid a couple of looms to do the 8 harness tie-up for a 3-1/1-3 block twill and I still spent two or three class sessions on the floor under the loom, but I was enjoying spending the time with my friends and soon realized that because I had paid for the open studio sessions, I was actually weaving every week and not just dreaming about it.I finally was ready to weave the scarves after about four weeks of preparation.

I first wove one with gray silk weft and randomly switched between the blocks. As I was weaving it, I decided I didn’t like it very much.

This one shows off the painted warp yarn better, and has twill texture and three-dinensional stripes.

I wanted to do the second one with orange weft, but also decided to do the whole thing with just one of the two blocks, producing a consistent stripe rather than the shifting blocks. As I was weaving I liked that one better. It showed up the painted yarn more effectively, and I liked the texture of the stripes. When it was taken off the loom, I discovered that treadling just one of the blocks had also produced a three-dimensional effect in the stripes with the 3-1 twill  producing raised stripes and the 1-3 stripes receding.

I finished the two scarves, twisted the fringe, and wet-finished them. After they were finished I ended up liking the gray one with the blocks a little better than the striped one. However, I also found that both of them were heavier that I had anticipated.

They do drape, but they are more the weight of a man’s neck scarf than the sort of silk scarf a woman would wear with a dress. Belatedly, I realized that the block twill scarves I had been looking at in the magazine were woven of much finer yarn, so even the effect of the twill blocks was quite different. If I did it again I would try to use a finer silk for the weft. Still, they are quite elegant scarves and perhaps part of my reservation comes from the simple fact that I live in Hawaii and we just do not have the right climate for this sort of a heavy silk scarf.

Two slk block twill scarves

At any rate, I’m glad I signed up for the semester of open studio, and I enjoyed the cameraderie of the group. The following semester I initially signed up for the class, but we managed to fill it to capacity, so I gave up my slot. I was too busy this semester to devote an evening every week to a weaving class, but I’ll think about doing it again next fall.

I satisfied my curiosity about eight harness block twill and now have absolutely no desire to change the tie-up on my countermarche loom to do more of it in the near future. If I did it again, it would either be with finer yarn for a scarf, or perhaps with wool for a completely different effect. We have a yardage show coming up in a year and a half–Hmmm, -maybe I’ll sign up for the weaving class again and do some block twill yardage.

I was spending Christmas with my children in Portland, so to keep the costs down a bit, I brought back two suitcases of the yarn for the Honolulu workshop–and for a second smaller workshop that she did on the Big Island the following weekend. Half of it was pre-measured skeins and 5 yard warps for us to dye on Sunday, and the rest was absolutely gorgeous hand-dyed–really hand-painted–yarn in Teresa’s signature style.  The colors are intense, in nice weaverly blended color combinations–shades of blue and green, rust and gold, and one pink and orange one that I managed to claim for myself.

My plain weave scarf with Teresa Ruch's mixed tencel and bamboo hand-dyed warp, and fuschia 10/2 tencel weft.

Some were all tencel, some all bamboo, and others were a mix of the two yarns,  in 5/2, 8/2 and 10/2 weights . Each one came with warping instructions for 10 or 12 dent reeds with two ends per dent–enough to do a lot of samples and also make a scarf.  I made up a list of the colors, yarns, and weights, and let participants pick one in advance. The plan was that each weaver would warp and “own” one warp, but we would move around to sample the different possibilities before weaving a scarf on our own. She had also sent a lot of solid color cones of tencel and bamboo to be used as weft.

The workshop was held in the weaving room at the Academy Art Center at Linekona, which is where regular weaving classes are held in fall and spring. Teresa was a great teacher, and very generous with her knowledge. While she regaled us with stories of commercial and production weaving, we learned all sorts of things about how to achieve nice drape in handwoven cloth. We learned to make the weft finer than the warp, and how to achieve a consistent beat. She had brought a lot of pick glasses, which several of us bought, and we learned how to count threads and beat gently to achieve a specific number of picks per inch.

This close-up shows the color changes in the painted warp with fuschia weft.

Although we were encouraged to use twill for better drape, I had warped 6 harnesses in straight draw and then tried to do a 3-1 twill, discovering belatedly that you cannot do that twill on six harnesses! It came out with a strange zigzag that was kind of interesting, but too strange for a whole scarf. I decided to just weave it in plain weave, rather than spending an hour on the floor changing the tie-up to some other twill that would work on six harnesses.

Because I was slow getting started and there were other looms with the tencel and bamboo combination warp, fewer people tried out my warp and I ended up with a nice six-foot long scarf. That is longer than I would ordinarily make a scarf, but when I was in Portland my son’s girl friend was wearing long scarves in the latest style–wrapped loosely completely around the neck with both ends hanging way down in front. Mine works perfectly to wear that way and it goes very well with a soft coral tee shirt.

She also taught us a neat trick for dealing with fringe. She does her hemstitching at both ends of the weaving, but spaces out the fringe area with cardboard spacers, and weaves about 3/4 of an inch of plain weave at both ends. (At the beginning, she starts with that edge, then the spacing, and then begins weaving the scarf.) She leaves these woven edge in place when the piece is wet-finished, which keeps the fringe from getting tangled. She then cuts off this edge, using it as a cutting guide for the fringe. She does not twist these fine fringes and in her pieces they are quite short.

After a quick wash in my washing machine and some ironing to restore the shine to the tencel, my scarf drapes beautifully. She also taught us to beat the piece against a table edge to increase the shine! I left my fringe about 3 inches long, but did not twist and knot the fringe. Haven’t tried washing it again, but the fringe is holding up very well with regular wear.

This was 5/2 bamboo warp with aqua 8/2 tencel weft in a 2-2 twill.

I also did some samples on a couple of other looms. She wanted us to do samples in plain weave and twill, with a couple of different weights of weft yarn so we could see the different effects. I liked this one in shades of blue and aqua. I bought some more of her painted warp to do another of my own, but have not yet gotten the weft yarn for it. I found that I liked her 10/2 tencel weft best, but it is very hard to find these days.  I guess I will have to settle for 8/2, which is more widely available. The tencel is much shinier than the bamboo, but the mixed bamboo and tencel warps like my pink and orange one have a nice glint even in the fringe.

She also taught us a very neat trick for evening up your weaving at the start. If you weave two or three picks without beating at all, and then  firmly but slowly to pull the beater forward to push the weft threads in place, the weaving will align perfectly across the warp, even if it seemed to be lopsided or wobbly before. That and the other little tricks were definitely worth the price of admission!

We all wore our scarves to the next Hui meeting and shared some of the special tips we had learned in this great workshop. I’ll write about the dyeing workshop another day.

It takes about four and a half hours to drive from Crystal Lake to Ann Arbor, so I brought along a knitting project. I had bought two super balls in Portland at the beginning of the summer, and wanted to make the felted balls in Susan B. Anderson’s Itty Bitty Toys. (Artisan, 2009). I bought the book last spring at a yarn shop in Philadelphia, and then discovered I already had a copy at home, so now I have one in Honolulu and one at the lake.  I’ve already made the snake using some leftover sock yarn.

When I bought the book, I also had bought a ball of Crystal Palace Yarns  Taos  in beautiful red, orange, gold and lavender shades, on sale. It was 100% wool and I was quite sure it would felt.  The original design called for Manos del Uruguay yarn, but I thought that would be a waste of the beautiful Manos yarn.  The idea is basically to knit a loose pouch around the ball, and then throw it into the washing machine to felt it. Sounded like great fun. Because it would be felted, the instructions were to knit it on size 10 1/2 double-pointed needles, but of course I was going to do it on two circulars instead. My new beautiful wooden knitting needle set included that size or something close to it (7 mm), and I had made sure I bought an extra pair of the needles with this project in mind.

My new set of wooden knitting needles with interchangeable cables

But of course in my usual slapdash way, I had bought balls that were bigger than they were supposed to be. The instructions called for super balls four inches in diameter and eight inches in circumference. Mine were about 13 inches in circumference. So I followed the general instructions, but began with 11 stitches instead of 9, and then added a couple more rows and another row of increases. I probably increased more than I needed to, as I ended up with a pouch that looked sort of like an acorn squash, with folds all around. I finished the first ball just as we pulled into Al McWaters’ yard. The new wooden needles knitted beautifully. They’re highly polished and a joy to work with.

After Bill unloaded the wood, we  left the truck in the yard and Al’s wife Pam Puntenny drove us down to the edge of the Art Fair. We took Coal along in the car because she didn’t want to leave him alone outside. He looked a little bewildered when we suddenly got out of the car, but he didn’t complain. It was a hot day, but fortunately it didn’t look like it would rain.

We have an established routine for the Art Fair and we are able to walk past about 80 percent of the booths. The Ann Arbor Art Fair is actually four different fairs that occupy different streets. First, we stop to talk to our woodworker friend Greg Williams, who always has beautiful jewelry boxes, some of which are made with wood provided by Bill. While Bill talks wood with Greg, I pop into the Shevel Gallery behind his booth, which usually carries some work by a potter I’ve been collecting. This time I wasn’t interested in what was on display. We then work our way towards the center of the fair, stopping to look at any wood or fiber booths. We stopped on a side street to talk to another woodworker friend, Dan Ericson, who was in the art fair for the first time and had some nice turned pieces.

Next we headed to State Street so I could spend some time at the big booth of the Ann Arbor Fiber Arts Guild. This year there wasn’t much weaving in their booth, and much of it was done by just two weavers, Marie Giles and Riin Gill. Marie Giles had some nice rippsmatta mats, and some very cute little stuffed fish made out of scraps of handwoven material. They were a good size for pin cushions or Christmas tree ornaments, in varied fish shapes with button eyes and occasionally ribbon tails. I will take that idea back to our Hawaii Handweavers Hui as a way to recycle bits of handwoven material for guild sales. We sometimes make glasses cases or small bags, but these were cute and different.

There was some hand dyed yarn, but most of it was 8/2 cotton or tencel, which I don’t use, and I refrained from getting any of the lovely  handspun and hand-dyed  plied wool because I already have quite a bit and don’t yet know what to do with it.  There were also a number of nuno felted scarves. We learned how to do nuno felting in a Handweavers Hui workshop with Melissa Arnold last spring. It was fun to learn how to do it, but I much prefer weaving.

We then checked out the Ann Arbor Potters Guild display, where I bought a small piece, and continued checking out the wood and fiber booths in the other fair areas. The wood was quite good, but I found the fiber disappointing.The weaver with the beautifully designed and tailored suits from last year was not in the fair this year, and no one else came near her in quality. There was little hand weaving, and much of that was in chenille, cotton and synthetic yarns. Only one weaver, Andrea Anderson, had some silk and bamboo scarves and some nice original twills.

We finished cruising the fair in about four hours, and went back to pick up Coal. They said he had spent the afternoon lying in the shade where he could see our truck and knew we were coming back. On the drive home I started knitting the second ball, and realized I wouldn’t have enough of the Taos to finish it. It was already getting too dark to knit, so I stopped with enough Taos yarn left for the other end, and planned to use some lavender Nashua wool and alpaca for a wide stripe in the middle.

Fuzzy Felted Balls

The next day I finished the second ball, and tossed them both in the washing machine with some detergent and ran a short cycle on hot/warm. When I checked the balls, they had partially felted, but because my pouches were so fat in the middle, each of the balls had a sort of duck bill flap sticking out one side. I pushed and pulled and got the balls more or less back in shape, and ran them through a couple more cycles. When they were pretty well felted but still a little puffy, I took them out and worked them a bit by hand, finally ending up with two nice felted balls that bounce softly and are perfect for indoor use.  Of course most of the intricate design in the Taos yarn is lost in the felting process, but you can still see the color variation. One is for my granddaughter Abigail, and the other is for Coal. I may make some more smaller ones as Christmas presents for other dogs in the family. Maybe next time I can get the right size balls, and can see how fat the pouches are supposed to be when you follow the directions!

The following week I went to Gothenburg, Sweden, to attend the International Sociological Association Congress and give a paper. I was excited about the possibility of finding a real weaving store in  the second largest city in Sweden.

The male hotel concierge couldn’t find anything in Google, and wasn’t even sure what word to use, but one of the women told me how to get to a yarn shop just a few tram stops away, on a side street and down in a basement. I asked if it was a weaving or a knitting shop and she said it had everything. I had a couple of free hours before my presentation, and couldn’t resist setting off for the yarn shop. I found the side street and a couple of blocks down, found the yarn shop.

It was mostly knitting yarn. They had nice color-matched skeins of hand-dyed wool in two weights and matching loop mohair, but it was from Latin America so it was not a particular bargain to buy in Europe. One display table had some interesting cones of multi-colored flat novelty yarn in three or four colorways, but there was no price or label. They showed it knitted up in combination with another yarn and it was quite attractive. When I asked, they said it was Noro mulberry paper yarn. I had never seen this particular yarn before anywhere, although they said it had been available for quite some time. At any rate, I was not about to buy Japanese Noro yarn in Sweden, so I filed that away to look for on my next trip to Japan in October.

Then I found the sale baskets. There wasn’t much, but I found a couple of skeins of loop mohair, and a nice skein of Colinette mohair in peach shades. So I bought those and called it a day.

The next morning I asked again at the concierge desk, saying that I thought there must be a weaving store, not just the knitting yarn store. They still couldn’t find one, but this time they sent me a five minute walk away to a different knitting yarn store called Daisy Design. The owner told me there used to be a weaving yarn store in Gothenburg, but it had moved to northern Sweden.

This yarn store had a display of gorgeous circular knitting needle sets made of multicolored wood. I believe they dye strips of the wood in different colors, and then cut and turn the wood so the colors come out in variegated patches. I actually have a set of salt and pepper shakers at the lake made out of the same kind of wood. At any rate, I couldn’t resist. So I bought myself a beautiful set of circular needles with different cable lengths, and threw in a few extra needles and cables, since I usually knit socks and other things in the round with two circular needles of the same size. I was dealing in Euros, and it was easy to forget that they were actually considerably more than dollars.  And the shop was happy to take my credit card.

This shop also had some heavy linen yarn on sale, so I bought several balls in cranberry, tan, black, and grey. There was a small display of Debby Bliss Pure Silk yarn, which I have been using for the past year. It was not on sale, but the shop owner said this yarn is being discontinued and won’t be available at all anymore. She was about to put it on sale, so she offered it to me at the sale price. I bought a few skeins of a light grey that I have been using in combination with other hand-painted silks. I had bought enough in this store that the owner filled out a tax free form for me, sealed up the bag, and explained what I needed to do to get the tax back at the airport. I left reasonably happy with my yarn shopping, but disappointed that I had not found a real weaving store in Sweden.

That afternoon, my last day in Sweden, I had signed up for a tour of a Viking village as part of the Congress activities. It was a nice half-hour  bus ride with a knowledgeable guide to the Viking village, which is being reconstructed on the site where they found a viking ship in the 1930s. The main building looks like an inverted boat, with a long curved roof. We stepped inside the building and there it was– a real, warp-weighted loom!

Warp-weighted loom at Viking village in Sweden

I had read about warp-weighted looms in Elizabeth  Barber’s books, but of course I had never seen a real one. Barber has written about how archaeologists had found lots of sites with simple  upright wooden structures and a pile of clay or stone objects on the floor, but for a long time they did not comprehend that these were the remains of weaving looms. Now they know that the pile of weights is the tell-tale sign of a warp-weighted loom. The loom I saw  had doughnut-shaped clay loom weights. I bought a replica of one in the gift shop that looks just like the black one in the lower left of the picture below. I guess I’ll use it as a paper weight.

Warp weights tied to warp threads. My souvenir looks just like the black one at lower left.

In Inge Dam’s workshop in Honolulu she had showed us how they sometimes made a narrow woven band to hold the warp threads for a warp-weighted loom. They would measure out the warp threads at double the desired length, and weave them as weft into the band, so that the warps were all trailing out of one side of the band. Then they could tie the woven band horizontally across the top of the vertical warp-weighted loom, and attach the weights to the ends of the warp threads. The one I saw did not seem to have such a band across the top.

There were a number of young people sitting around in costume, but they said the one person who know how to weave on the loom was not there that day. The loom had places to hold the shed bar, and there was a beater stick in the shed that apparently was used to beat the weft in. The loom weights really did hold the warp threads down quite firmly, but it still seems crazy to me that you would have to beat upward to put each weft thread in place. The small amount that had been woven was put in quite loosely, and I don’t think the woolen yarn would have filled in the spaces even if it were wet-finished. The homespun garments the young workers were wearing had certainly not been made on this loom.

This type of warp-weighted loom was in use in northern Europe around 1000 C.E., at a time when the Chinese and Japanese were weaving beautifully patterned silk brocades on horizontal looms–both simple floor looms and drawlooms with multiple harnesses. You can weave on a warp-weighted loom, but nobody today would want to when there are better alternatives available.

So even though I didn’t find a weaving store, I left Sweden delighted that I had seen a real warp-weighted loom. I was even happier when I turned in my tax-free form at the airport and received $27 back on my yarn store purchase.

Her present included $75 worth of yarn. I figured I would go over the $75 limit, and would use her gift for the fun yarns and my own money for the basics. I had a wonderful time poking around and checking everything out. Last year my main mission was to buy temples, but this time I wanted to get some bamboo yarn to use as warp for scarves. They have Bamboodle, which is just the right size for me because it warps at 12 epi. I got a large cone of Safari, a pale beige that I had used earlier with Noro sock yarn to make scarves. Before I just had a mini-cone of it, which barely made a 4 yard warp. Now I wanted to have a more generous stock of it as a basic warp color. I also wanted to get some small cones, but first I needed  to find some interesting weft yarns to go with it.

Warp chain and bobbins for the red scarf at left, and the cone and ball of yarn for the purple one at right.

At the time I was still thinking about the Handwoven weaving with sock yarn contest, but I wasn’t really interested in the standard sock yarns. I found some balls of Mini Mochi, which has long color transitions similar to Noro, but in more subdued and limited color ranges. It is the weight of sock yarn, and is machine washable merino and nylon. I selected one ball of a red-brown range and another in purples and other dark shades,and found mini-cones of Bamboodle that would go with them. I only bought one ball of each color of Mini Mochi, which looked like enough for one scarf. Only later did I remember that my Noro sock yarn was twice as big a ball, and that I had made two scarves on my Bamboodle warp before.

Then I found my real trophy: a beautiful handpainted skein of silk yarn in turquoise, blues, and greens. The tag said “Avalanche” and I later discovered that Avalanche is the name of pure white silk sold by Halcyon and Henry’s Attic. That was the yarn that had been handpainted. I bought a couple more mini-cones of the Bamboodle to go with the silk yarn, though I do not know if I will end up using them together.

This is the luscious skein of handpainted Avalanche silk yarn

Laura used her cell phone and Yelp to pick a Panini place for lunch and then a place to get coffee. We stopped at the bakery to get an apple strudel–last year the dogs had stolen the one I bought! We had time for lots of leisurely conversation and got back to Thousands Oaks in time to catch up with the rest of the family for dinner.  This time we put the strudel on top of the refrigerator! I felt a bit guilty having Laura do all that driving on her brief vacation, since she has to commute over an hour to work every day, but she was fine with it. All in all, it was a terrific Christmas present with lots of fond memories.

This past week I warped the loom with the red Bamboodle called Lipstick, to make the first scarf. Because the Mini Mochi yarn has color transitions similar to Noro, I  wound the whole ball onto four bobbins and carefully laid them out in sequence so that I could use them in reverse order and keep the color transitions right across the four bobbins. When I started the weaving, I thought that it was too open, so I started experimenting. One of the two skeins of fine mohair and silk that I had bought in Berkeley was just the right shade of rusty rose–the label called it Vermilion. It is a lace weight yarn, so it didn’t add much thickness. I tried doubling it, but still was uncertain. It was fairly late, so I decided to wait until morning and figure out what to do when I had good daylight to see the colors.

Here are the yarns for the red bamboo and Mini Mochi scarf, with the skein of mohair and silk.

When I came back to it the next morning, I remembered that I had wet-finished my scarves. I didn’t want to waste any of the Mini Mochi by making a sample, since I thought I would have barely enough for one scarf. Instead, I cut off a length of the Mini Mochi, the mohair, and the Bamboodle, cut each length in half, and then washed one half with a little liquid soap and dried them. To my relief, both the Mini Mochi and the bamboo warp yarn bloomed–the Mini Mochi fluffed up to about double its thickness, and both yarns softened up. Only the mohair seemed unchanged, but that didn’t matter. It would work using single strands of Mini Mochi and the mohair together.

I decided to do the scarf in my usual 2-2 twill, so I pulled out the end warp thread on each side and turned it into a floating warp so the twill selvedges would stay neat. But now that I was through fiddling, I needed to wind bobbins that combined the Mini Mochi with the fine mohair. Since I had already wound all four bobbins and had the color sequence right, I had to unwind one bobbin at a time, and then rewind it with the mohair. I did just the first bobbin so I would not get them mixed up. However, even though the mohair was really fine, it did thicken the yarn and so I had to wind part of it onto a second bobbin. I then started weaving with the first of the rewound bobbins. I thought the color transition was a little abrupt when I started on the second smaller bobbin, but it wasn’t until I went to rewind the next bobbin that I realized what had happened.

I had rewound the bobbin correctly to preserve the color transitions, but when it expanded onto two bobbins of the combined yarns I had forgotten that I needed to start with the very end of the yarn, meaning the second of the rewound bobbins, not the first! Oh well, it wasn’t a very abrupt color change, and no one will notice it but me. I have now rewound the second one and am starting with the correct one this time.

A closeup of a very red part of the twill scarf. Can you see the halo of mohair?

The scarf is weaving up nicely in twill, and the fine mohair blends with the warp thread to soften the overall effect of the weft colors. Since it is mohair, I tried brushing it on the loom, the way I do with much thicker mohair in my mohair shawls. It produces a fine halo of mohair, and I am hoping it will still be there after I wet finish the piece.

The van driver was sure he could find the location, although he was busily consulting the map and his GPS before we even left the airport. It was still dark when the driver pulled up at the Haas Business School and told me that if I just walked through that gate, the faculty club was right there. I paid the driver and set off through the gate. Fortunately, I had only a small wheeled weekend suitcase and my wheeled computer bag. I wheeled them through the gate and quickly discovered that it was not possible to get past the Business School to the Faculty Club from that location. Instead, I was on an elevated plaza with a railing looking down at the campus, with the Business School buildings on both sides. In the dark I could see no way to get down into the rest of the campus from there. I found a lighted doorway and consulted my map. It looked like I would need to go back to the street and find the next roadway into the campus in order to get to the Faculty Grove, where the Faculty Club was located.

I went down the street about a block and found a spot where a road seemed to be heading into the campus. With some trepidation I wheeled my two bags down the sloping road in the dark. As I passed some other campus buildings I stopped wherever there was a light to consult my map, and I seemed to be heading in the right direction. I reached a little plaza with a direction sign that pointed to the Faculty Grove off to the left. The first entry to the Grove involved a flight of steps that I did not want to negotiate with two bags, but a bit farther along I found a path that led down into the grove. At the bottom I found paths going in several directions and a statue, but still could not find the Faculty Club in the dark.

Thank heavens for cell phones! I called the Faculty Club and described my location to the person on night duty. He said I was very close, and just needed to head north. Of course I had no idea which way was north! He finally walked out of the Faculty Club and with some further guidance in the very dim light I could see him waving to me from across a wide lawn off to the left. And so I made it to the Faculty Club and was able to sleep for a few hours.

When I woke up I still had time for an afternoon yarn excursion. I had previously looked up several yarn stores in the Berkeley and Oakland area. A consultation with the young woman at the desk led me to choose a shop called Stash that had recently moved to Colusa Avenue in the Solano district of north Berkeley as the closest and safest location. She wrote down the name and phone number of a taxi driver named Biswas whom she assured me knew how to get right to the back door of the Faculty Club.

He did indeed, and he took me right to the yarn shop. The shop was a small knitting store, but it had a nice selection of unusual yarns along with the more ordinary ones. I wasn’t looking for anything in particular, and in fact was feeling a bit guilty about spending any more money on yarn because I had been doing more yarn buying than weaving during a busy fall of teaching and traveling. I spent a pleasant hour going through everything and then finally selected just four skeins of yarn.

Two skeins of Twisted Sisters handpainted yarn.

Two skeins were handpainted silk and merino wool yarn from the Twisted Sisters, whose sock knitting books I was familiar with. The yarn was a worsted weight and I thought it might work as stripes in a warp, which could be positioned for an ikat effect since the pattern was on about a one-yard repeat. I bought two skeins of it to make sure I would have enough to do something interesting.

Four skeins of yarn from the Stash yarn store in Berkeley.

Then I could not resist two small skeins of a beautiful yarn called haiku from  Alchemy. They were silk and mohair, hand-dyed but essentially variations of one color. The yarn was a lace weight with a delicate mohair quality, although they were suggesting size 8 knitting needles. It was much finer than I would use all alone for weaving, but I thought it would be gorgeous doubled with something else in a scarf. I bought one skein of lavender and another of a rose-rust color.

By the time I had finished my yarn buying and had taken a quick look around the interesting neighborhood, I just had time to get a chai at the Starbucks on the corner before returning to the Faculty Club. I called Biswas the cab driver and he told me to wait in the Starbucks until he arrived.

As I was drinking my chai in a comfortable chair in Starbucks, I noticed  a homeless man pushing a grocery cart of his belongings on the street outside. I immediately felt guilty, thinking about sitting in Starbucks drinking my expensive drink while he was outside homeless on the street. Then, to my amazement, he parked his cart on the corner, came into the Starbucks, and ordered his own expensive coffee! Ah yes, that is what being homeless in Berkeley is about.